Tag: sauce labs

I recently switched teams at Sauce Labs. I used to be the sole person on the Integrations team, and after more than a year feeling pretty isolated, my mental state was slipping pretty hard, so when an opportunity came up to switch departments, I took it.

So now I’m on the IT team, which as a developer is kinda confusing, but its giving me the oppertunity to do some customer facing work, and a lot of internal facing work. I always love working on items that I get to actually see improving peoples work life.

So starting day 0, I had some work to finish off, but I wanted to get to know the team better, and whatnot, so I kept an eye on the internal tickets. Quickly I started to notice that a lot of tickets had to have the initial question of “Whose your manager.” so one day during our team’s huddle, I made the offhand comment that I had enough experience making JIRA plugins, I could probably take the HR data (which I had already mucked with in past projects) and add a little widget to JIRA providing basic info. I felt so exposed, I didn’t want to feel like I was intruding or taking over or anything, but no, as expected the team loved the idea.

Over the next few weeks between whatever else came up, I started working on this little project. I had seen on the atlassian developers community form that someone had made a flask-ac integration. This was perfect. This would give me an excuse to get more familiar with python (which is the main language at Sauce Labs) and even poke around with how packages were made. This module turned out to be pretty hipchat focused, but gave me a bunch of ideas.

I decided I still wanted to learn about packaging and releasing, but also wanted to get something out. So I started to hack the existing system a bit and made an integration. First version was pretty crude. Lots of hard coded stuff, but no credentials. That was my only real goal was to make sure credentials and sensitive items were never hard coded.

First release. Team was estatic. Showed name, phone number, office location and manager. This made thier lives easier because they knew managers and who was local and who wasn’t without the ackward question.

But this wasn’t enough. I really wanted to learn how to package python packages. So I started reading up on how flask plugins were created. Turns out pretty simple actually. So started to refactor a bunch of things. Then I got another jira based project at work. Okay this is perfect. Now I have 2 projects using the shared functionality.

Short story even shorter, I managed to get Flask-AtlassianConnect released. I released it under my own name because I spent mostly after hours polishing it up. Plus I didn’t really think anyone else would want to maintain it. I’m still iffy on that bit, but nobody seemed to mind. So yay! I have a published pip package.

I wasn’t done there. I wanted to get the original JIRA plugin all cleaned up and open sourced. We can’t be the only people out there that use BambooHR and also JIRA. So again, in between tasks I cleaned up the implementation. Now it had a full config screen. Let you pick what to display. Let you choose with projects it would be integrated with. Etc. Now it was ready to go. Plus now I knew how to write tests.

So I’m proud to announce (a little late here though) that the BambooHR + Jira Cloud plugin I wrote is open source. I had so much fun doing it. I hope this new position will lead to many more projects that we can open source for others to use as needed.

I am absolutely ecstatic to announce the new Sauce Labs and HipChat integration being not only released to the public, but open source as well. Its been officially out for a month now, but we just went ahead and open sourced it.

About two months ago now, Atlassian hosted their Atlassian Connect Week out in San Diego. If you do any Atlassian based development, I highly recommend going if you can. It’s so much fun to be surrounded by other developers, and be able to ask the original teams questions when you get stuck.

I went into connect week hoping to get a solution for our problem talking to jira server users behind a firewall. Someone had an amazing solution within the first couple hours for me, and I was able to bang out a working prototype in the by the end of the second day.

So what do I do now? I had most of the week left over. Well at a previous internal sauce labs hackathon, I had already started playing around with a slack integration, but was kinda disappointed by its public APIs, so didn’t really get very far. I got really excited at the earlier talks about hipchat integration to see how far I could get.

It turned out I could get something done pretty quickly. This time I decided to use the atlassian-connect-express framework so I could focus on just implementing features. And what a good choice that was. By the end of the first day, I had test results showing up in chat. By the end of the week, I had screenshots available, test information, even video working. I had a direct connection to some of the developers, so was able to play around with even more features.

Curious how it looks? But don’t really want to install it yet? Checkout this awesome animated gif one of our product team members created.

I’m so absolutely excited for this integration, and on top of that, as someone who loves contributing open source, a great example of a working hipchat integration for everyone to learn from and contribute to.

I'm a software developer at the awesome Sauce Labs. I do a bunch of other random open source development. I also play games, both board and video games and love to read.
You can usually find me on various services as halkeye